In china’s crisis, Xi sees a crucible to strengthen his rule

FILE PHOTO: Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a welcome ceremony with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (not pictured) outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China October 25, 2019. REUTERS/Florence Lo

Before an adulatory crowd of university professors and students, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, offered a strikingly bold message about the global coronavirus pandemic. Summoning images of sacrifice from Communist Party lore, he told them that the calamity was ripe with possibility for China.

“Great historical progress always happens after major disasters,” Xi said during a recent visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University. “Our nation was steeled and grew up through hardship and suffering.”

Xi, shaped by his years of adversity as a young man, has seized on the pandemic as an opportunity in disguise — a chance to redeem the party after early mistakes let infections slip out of control, and to rally national pride in the face of international ire over those mistakes. And the state propaganda machine is aggressively backing him up, touting his leadership in fighting the pandemic.

Now, Xi needs to turn his exhortations of resolute unity into action — a theme likely to underpin the National People’s Congress, the annual legislative meeting that opens on Friday after a monthslong delay.

He is pushing to restore the prepandemic agenda, including his signature pledge to eradicate extreme poverty by this year, while cautioning against complacency that could let a second wave of infections spread.

He must do all this while the country faces a diplomatic and economic climate as daunting as any since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.

“If you position yourself as a great helmsman uniquely capable of leading your country, that has a lot of domestic political risk if you fail to handle the job appropriately,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of Chinese law and politics at Fordham University. “That’s a risk for Xi going forward.”

Xi has cast himself as the indispensable leader, at the ramparts to defend China against intractable threats. The shift has provoked the party cadre — and by all appearances much of the public — to coalesce around his leadership, whatever misgivings they may have about the bungling of the outbreak.

“If we had frozen time at Feb 1, this would be very bad for the Chinese leadership,” said Jude Blanchette, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC

Xi made his first public appearance in the crisis only two days after ordering Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began, to be locked down in late January. He presided over an unusual televised session of the country’s top political body, the Politburo Standing Committee. By then, thousands of people had been infected and scores had died.

According to a lengthy account of the emergency that appeared in People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, he somberly told the committee that he had difficulty sleeping the night before — the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday.

Xi also seemed to shrink, temporarily, from his usual monopoly on centre stage. He put the country’s No. 2 leader, Premier Li Keqiang, in charge of the government’s emergency response, possibly to position himself to deflect blame if the crisis worsened.

As China got the outbreak under control, the party’s propaganda pivoted again toward Xi, pushing the premier into the background. Li will deliver the keynote report to the National People’s Congress on Friday, but it will be Xi who dominates the acclamatory media coverage, likely dispensing advice to provincial leaders and delegates, and repeating policy priorities.

There are few signs that Xi has been chastened by the failures in the beginning of the country’s fight against the disease — nor by the international criticism.

“All along, we have acted with openness, transparency and responsibility,” he told the World Health Assembly on Monday.

Xi, though, has warned that China faces an increasingly uncertain world. He has often leavened his promises of a bright future with warnings against a possible economic meltdown, foreign crisis or political decay. Last month, he sounded unusually ominous.

“Confronted with a grim and complicated international epidemic and global economic developments, we must keep in mind how things could bottom out,” he told a Politburo Standing Committee. “Be mentally and practically prepared to deal with long-lasting changes in external conditions.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge involves the economy, which contracted for the first time since China began its remarkable transformation more than four decades ago. The rising prosperity of millions of Chinese has been a pillar of the Communist Party’s legitimacy ever since.

In recent weeks during visits to three provinces, Xi has sought to return the focus to the policy agenda that predated the coronavirus. He went to coastal Zhejiang and two inland provinces, Shanxi and Shaanxi.

Wearing his trademark dark blue windbreaker and, when indoors, a mask, Xi has visited factories, ports, government offices and scenic spots trying to return to life while enforcing new safeguards against infection. In poorer inland villages, he has lingered over crops of wood ear fungus and chrysanthemum — the kinds of commercial farming crucial to his anti-poverty drive.

“Your wood ear fungus here is famous,” he told a clapping crowd of villagers in Shaanxi, Chinese television news showed. “This is your way out of poverty and into prosperity.”

But even the Communist Party’s polished propaganda stagecraft showing China overcoming the epidemic can reveal how life remains far from normal. Footage of his visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University indicated that the crowd of cheering students and professors waiting for Xi was arranged while the university remained largely closed.